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The open source Derby database engine provides developers with a powerful new tool for lightweight database development. Derby databases are file system based and portable across different types of systems. Because of this, a common strategy is to create databases at development time and ship them with the binary distribution as opposed to having it created on the fly.

Astaro's unified threat management package provides complete protection for the corporate environment

Monta Vista and other companies like Timesys have gone a different route by improving the real-time performance of the Linux kernel. This is done by tracking down the various routines that limit interrupt response time and recoding them more efficiently from an interrupt standpoint.

These are files for a coming release from Service Integrity, a company based in Newton, Massachusetts, selling software that helps businesses mine their data for customer leads. Each file highlighted in a bright color represents a match with known "open-source" code covered by a license. And each match represents a potential problem that Service Integrity must resolve. . Henry calls up a pair of windows crammed with identical lines of code. He quickly picks out an open-source file that is using borrowed code that can be traced to a popular Web site devoted to macabre puzzles.

Philadelphia-area small business clients money and make their computers more reliable by installing Linux and other open source programs.

An interesting dicussion on the lkml examined the efficiency of the inode cache in the 2.4 Linux kernel, discussing several tunables primarily helpful to systems serving large NFS or Samba mounts. In particular, a slowdown was reported on such a system easily reproducible by doing a find / while cat'ing large files to /dev/null. In a discussion between 2.4 maintainer Marcelo Tosatti, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton and VM maintainer Andrea Arcangeli, it was decided that this was likely due to too small of an inode cache hash table resulting in a large number of collisions. For the work case in question, some tunables looked to prove helpful. Going forward, effort might be made in 2.6 or beyond to improve the inode cache.

Starting a software company used to be hard work. Some smart people had a vision for a new product, obtained financing and spent months or years developing new software. But that's all changed now. All the smart people at Octane Security in Shakopee had to do was download some free Linux network security software from the Internet, tweak the code a bit and start selling it earlier this month for $2,200 to about $10,000, depending on the size of the network being protected.

The government on Tuesday said it continues to evaluate options for using open source software, a move which would proliferate the usage of IT by bringing down its costs.

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, today announced the creation of a Open Source Software Licensing & Legal education track at its upcoming Enterprise Linux Summit - January 31 through February 2, 2005 in Burlingame, CA. The track will focus on OSS Licensing and the impact of OSS on enterprise computing as its use becomes more prevalent.

New features, including bandwidth monitoring, increased spam protection and improved network management integration, have been added to Astaro Corp.'s Security Linux 5.1 operating system.

All the Linux flavors I have tried have no problem dual-booting with Windows, but how do you boot multiple Linux flavors, like Fedora and Ubuntu? This is a great way to have your favorite distribution on the first drive (hda) and experiment with the hundreds of others on a second drive (hdb). I found many procedures by Googling, but most of them concentrated on booting two distros on the same hard drive. However, this is a very simple procedure.

When I first saw rumblings in the trade press about Novell's new Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) distribution, I was confused at best. Novell's own press corps, impressive in terms of sheer volume, didn't make this clear. As shown in Figure 1, the splash screen for the installer leaves no doubt that this is a new and unique Novell product. However, there's a good deal of general confusion about how NetWare, SUSE Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server, various mail products, eDirectory, ZENworks, Ximian's desktop and Evolution mail client, and now the Novell Linux Desktop all fit together.

The Gyration Media Center Remote is a radio keyboard and mouse with 100-foot range. The mouse uses an accelerometer rather than a mouse wheel, and thus has the unique feature that you can make mouse gestures in the air. The mouse should be perfect for a public speaker who wants to move around during a speech, without giving up control of his laptop. It would also make a nifty remote for a Linux PVR user, since it has VCR controls and channel and volume buttons. But does it work with Linux? Bruce Perens tried it out...

If you received a TiVo DVR or a Linksys router for Christmas, the open source people should sing praises to your name. Linux is appearing in households around the world in millions of nice devices and is so well-hidden under GUIs and web interfaces that the average user doesn't even know it is there. This quiet proliferation of dedicated Linux devices has gone unnoticed by both the open source crowd (who should be standing up and shouting about it from the rooftops) and SCO's lawyers (who could stand to collect a tidy sum if they could win a case and collect a dollar per box shipped).

The company introduces the first public beta of Novell Open Enterprise Server, a dual operating system that can run on top of either SLES 9.2 or the NetWare 7.0 kernel—or both.

Novell has begun a widely available trial of its Open Enterprise Server, software that combines tools from company's proprietary NetWare with the open-source SuSE Linux operating system.

The latest article in my "Secure Programmer" series is now available! This developerWorks series describes how to develop secure programs for Linux/Unix; this article describes how to securely invoke other programs.

Open Source Software, particularly the Linux Operating System, provides many advantages over proprietary Operating Systems, particularly Microsoft Windows. The advantages to Public School Systems, the increase in use of Linux in the Enterprise, the increase in Linux used as Web Servers, and the increase in the use of Linux by governments, makes Linux a viable alternative for use in Public School Systems. Gary Glasscock submitted the following editorial to osopinion/osViews which suggests that Public School Systems now have an economic and academic responsibility to introduce Linux into the mix of their Computer Science education curriculums.

Opinion:By embracing Linux and not forsaking NetWare with its Open Enterprise Server, Novell may have made its best move in years.

Discussing technology, the human experience, homeland security and the future with the author of Islands in the Clickstream.